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November 11, 2006 at 06:23 | Posted in Documentation of things, Grad school update, new york, Performances/Exhibitions, Things related to John Cage | Leave a comment

First:

My colleague Chris Tabron has a new blog: .::Light Matter::. where he posts photos.

Second:

I saw Sekou Sundiata’s the 51st (dream) State earlier this evening at BAM’s Howard Gillman Opera House. New York: you should be there tomorrow and/or Sunday. As you probably know most everything passes through John Cage before it gets to me, so my criticism is usually related to issues of overbearing narrative/message, decisions in production that seek to preserve/achieve meaning that wind up being reductive in regards to meaning’s potentiality to traverse the space between intention and reception, and other such audience-oriented heuristics. Sundiata is an overhwhelming exception to my redundant critiques, and a welcome one for me. He manages to present a context rife with implications of political critique, yet not born out of a desire to instill those critiques; his performance is fundamentally imbued with poetry, yet fails to access the format’s most tired breaths; he sets up a fecund bed in which the audience may rest their minds, and simply goes to work quietly in the corners: the corners of the space in such a way that the work never imposes (neither on the audience or any part within itself), and the corners of our minds in such a way that the work remains tangential and fragmented enough that it only hints at possible realms of thought, it never asks us to step into them. Over the course of the performance I was engaged mentally, intellectually, emotionally, and spatially. Half-way through I felt that I should do productive things when the time to leave would arrive; I came home and thoroughly cleaned a salvaged step ladder. It’s refreshing to be involved in something that can become a state of exception within the structures that mire me in life; thank you Mr. Sundiata and company.

Third:

I have a performance coming up on December 12th at Tisch (721 Broadway) room 636 from 7:00 PM until 8:00 PM. The performance will be the premiere of Music High for Bouncing Balls–a work that I began conceptualizing at some point in the summer. There will be ten performers including myself–five women and five men (these people as of right now): Zachary Moldof, Christopher Tabron, Daniel Coeyman, Sarah Lasry, Montzerrat Contreras Robles, Maria Amelia Franchignoni, (possibly) Biba Bell, and (possibly) Amalia Cordova. I still need two more male performers, and (possibly) two more female performers; holler at your boy. The composition will not be rehearsed before the performance; the performers will alternate between bouncing balls, and reading texts; time brackets, and dynamic parameters will be used. I am hoping to render a composition that is simple enough to not require specialized knowledge in order to be read, and does not have to be rehearsed ahead of time because it seems like a useful way to approach a compositional practice that grows out of an understanding of sound that privileges indeterminacy and the unaccountability of temperospatial multiplicity.

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